


Let It Happen

by Leamas



Category: Rifters Series - Peter Watts
Genre: F/M, Plot What Plot/Porn Without Plot, Pre-Canon, resentment sex? hatesex? something like that
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-03-05
Updated: 2017-03-05
Packaged: 2018-09-28 09:52:02
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,083
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10089635
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Leamas/pseuds/Leamas
Summary: Yves Scanlon takes what he can get.





	

**Author's Note:**

> I don't think it was ever mentioned how these two met, but I always got the impression they shared a bit of history together. If imagining a timeline helps, I pictured this taking place some time either early in their professional careers, or possibly even when/if they were in college together.

Patricia Rowan grips the front of Yves Scanlon’s pushes him against the wall. His shoulder blades touch the metal – mirror, he realises a moment later. He watches across the small, confined space of her room as the door clicks shut. The sound sends a shiver down his back and he stares dumbly as she turns around, unbuttoning her jacket and hanging it over the back of a chair.

Her room is artfully messy; organised by not neat. On her it’s a symbol for how busy she is that she can’t find the time to polish up her living space; his version is just a mess.

She’s looking at him, her arms folded over her chest. “Take off your shirt,” she tells him. He works so fast to obey that his fingers trip over themselves on the buttons. He hastily throws it to the floor, where it sits in a heap between them.

Rowan picks it up and throws it on the bed without looking away from him. Her room is adequately heated, but his skin prickles under the pressure of being watched. To stop his shoulders from rising he clenches a fist, feeling the groove of his nails in his hand.

Her grip on his chin – when she takes it – is strong. She pulls Yves down so they’re face-to-face. There’s only a difference of two inches in their height, and he forgets this entirely when she kisses his mouth. Her hands are cold; her lips are not.

A moment later she pushes his face away and studies him with a detached, clinical look. When she lets go Yves starts breathing again. To his horror he almost whines for loss of contact.

_Pathetic. Get a grip. You aren’t even undressed yet._

“Sit down,” Rowan says.

The chair is behind her so he takes a seat on the floor, folding his heals under his legs. She’s smiling warmly at him when he looks up at her, or what passes for warm on her face. The heel of her foot lands on his high and roots around the muscle, until it finds its place between his knees.

Rowan is looking at a spot on the wall adjacent to the mirror behind him. It takes a moment before she looks down on him: the remains of the electric signals dancing across her mercury contacts are just fading.

She puts a hand on his face, cupping his cheek lightly. He turns his face into her touch and she moves on to his shoulder, where her nails bite at the skin. He looks back up at her, and she gives him her other hand.

“Here, Yves,” Rowan tells him, and he takes it. He kisses her knuckles – so cold! – and the back of her palm. Her skin is smooth; his dry lips scratch against it.

His stomach clenches when he looks up and sees she’s watching him. Heat rushes to his face, but as he moves to turn away she puts her hand under his chin. Her foot moves up between his thighs and he only just stifles a gasp against the pressure. One hand takes a fistful of hair. She takes the other and covers his mouth and nose, stops his breathe in his throat.

“Look at me.”

He’s still for as long as he’s able. His fingers twitch and he digs them in his thighs. His lungs are burning and he tries to release a breath, but Rowan’s hand is in the way. Yves licks the inside of his teeth. A sound starts at his throat and dies just as quickly. When he twitches his thighs in place of ripping Rowan’s hand away from his mouth and sucking in a long, cool breath, Rowan pushes her foot harder against his cock. The pressure runs through him and he shivers; Rowan is smiling at him, and it’s cutting.

His lungs really are burning; his chest aches, but he tries to keep it in check. How long has it been? A minute? Two? Thirty seconds? Rowan’s fingers are curled around the bottom half of his face. Every time instinct tries to make him pull away the hand holding his hair pulls his head closer. When his lungs try for air all he gets is the stale taste of Rowan’s skin.

Yves’ hands move involuntarily. At the last moment, before they find Rowan’s wrists, he moves them to her thighs instead, catching a fistful of fabric.

The slap that follows is sudden but harsh, stinging his cheek. But Yves can breathe again. Rowan doesn’t let go of his hair, holding his head in place. The pull at his scalp stings as much as his cheek and stops him from moving as he heaves and tries to steady his breathing.

“Is this too much for you, Yves?”

“No,” he promises.

She pushes her foot harder against his cock and he groans – between the pressure and the stinging in his cheek he’s helpless not to. It’s embarrassing – he still has his pants on and only feels everything through the fabric. Rowan hasn’t undressed at all.

“Oh, Yves,” she tells him. The tone of her voice is so wrong on her that he knows she’s faking – she’s not even trying to pretend – but she fakes motherly so well that he might have been convinced she meant it, if only he didn’t know her. If only he hadn’t seen her giving presentations to people he knew didn't agree with her, or leading workshops for problems she knew she wouldn't be solving. If only he didn’t know what she thought of him. How her eyes watched warmly, and how she smiled fondly when he stumbled over the excuses he gave her, the ones he wasn’t sure if he even believed himself – was he slacking or could he really not keep up with her? – because while she could understand where he came from, she didn’t relate.

She pushes her foot harder against him and he groans. Again there’s a pain, an ache. He doesn’t want her to touch him; he hates her. The part of this that feels good is out of her control and he wants to squirm away from it, but the mirror is behind him and he wouldn’t move away from her for fear that she’d let him. She’d already asked if this is too much.

But it _does_ hurt. It isn’t pain but every time she moves something in his stomach falls away and he’s left floating. The pleasure isn’t his, but hers, and it doesn’t feel good but like something she’s inflicting on him. He closes his eyes and breathes through his nose, and she jams her fingers in his mouth, cruelly hooking them around his jaw.

“Yves,” she says, “You don’t need to look so scared. _You_ asked _me_ for this.”

 _Begged_ , he remembers.

Her hand pries his jaw open and she forces more fingers into his mouth, and he – sucks at her fingers, wrapping his lips up to the second knuckle. God, he hates her. Hates how she forces more of her hand between his lips, how her foot doesn’t move, how her hand in her hair does, and pulls. He hates how useless he is to her, how she can’t even humour him half the time. How she humours him now.

He’s glaring at her.

She says, “I won’t hurt you,” and he remembers the slap.

Her gaze is far away again. He thinks she’s looking at the mirror behind him and his cheeks darken to think of her watching his bony back, but then sees her eyes move. He scrapes his teeth along the back of her knuckles. She pushes her foot against him again and holds it, and gradually the pressure lessons. It’s relief and agony at the same time, and the static pressure between his thighs is maddening. He grinds against where she’s stands. It’s better that he can take his own pleasure – less like a knife stabbing up through him – but now it isn’t enough; it’s maddening.

Then she’s looking at him again. “Stand up.” He does. She turns away from him and touches her face – she’s taking out her contacts, he realises. He eyes the door – remembers it’s locked. Remembers he won’t get another chance if he leaves.

He does what she wants.

When she finishes taking out her contacts she reaches for her computer, tapping the screen a few times but not sitting down at the table. Yves Scanlon catches sight of his situation: naked and half hard, sitting on Patricia Rowan’s bed while she stands with her back facing him. The urge to curl up and take care of himself overcomes him. He wants to be in his room thinking about being on his knees in front of her and hating her for not letting him.

Rowan leans a knee on the bed next to him. He backs away. Her other leg slots between his, and she leans over him, holds him in place with another fistful of hair. He has to look up to see her. This close, there’s something beautiful about her. It’s her hard jaw and her soft cheekbones. Her dark hair tied at the base of her neck. Her shirt, although loose, still folds around her chest. Through the open top two buttons of her shirt he catches a glimpse of her skin, and imagines that it’s as soft as her hands.

She reaches between them, between his legs.

He pulls back. One of his hands grabs her shirt and the other reaches for her wrist, to stop her, but Rowan still has a hand in his hair, one leg between his. She pulls him back until his face is only a few inches away from hers. Her other hand ghosts along the insides of his thighs; when she finally grabs him, her grip is rough. She squeezes him, and Yves Scanlon whines.

It does not feel the same as when he does it. Everything feels a thousand times better – a thousand times worse – like she’s reached through the skin and rubbing right against his nerves. She’s unrelenting. Another whine catches in the back of his throat. His hips move with her hand but it doesn’t do any good. Patricia Rowan is everywhere. His eyes are half-lidded but he can’t look away from her. The attention she gives him is embarrassing, and he wishes she weren’t looking at him.

She gives a rough tug and he comes apart, arching his back and squeezing where he’s holding onto her. He’s panting. She doesn’t stop, even when he finishes and is shaking, holding onto her like she’s the last solid thing he knows because she is. He doesn’t know anything apart from where his hands latch onto her body, and where her hand rakes across the nerves on his dick.

Finally she does stop. She lets him go, and he falls back, still aware that she’s watching him. Yves doesn’t care. He covers his eyes with the back of his arm. By the time he rolls over and tries to cover the rest of him, Rowan’s turned away from the bed and is wiping down her hands.

“I need something from you.”

He makes a sound, pained or disgruntled, to acknowledge he heard.

“Some figures to look over.”

“Okay,” he says. “I don’t know what I can do–”

“It isn’t hard, Yves,” she says. “I don’t think it’ll take you long, but I’m busy.”

He looks up at her. She’s fiddling with her contacts again, probably already reading something. Whatever favour she wants, she made up her mind to ask for it in the last ten minutes, while she had her hand wrapped around his cock.

He takes this moment to swipe his clothes off the floor. He’ll clean up once he gets back to his room, if he doesn’t just collapse on his bed for the rest of the night.

“Send it over,” he says, once he has his pants on. He doesn’t bother buttoning his shirt up all the way, not when the door is right there.

Patricia Rowan makes a sound to indicate that she heard. She’s clearly busy. She’s known she’d be busy since the moment she read whatever message was sent to her, and she still took the time to get him off. Thinking about this makes Yves want to die.

He gets out of there as fast as he can, and thanks whatever god is left that she doesn’t try to stop him.


End file.
